Astro Blog

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/28/science/nasa-moon-rocket-launch.html By  Kenneth Chang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...astronauts will not actually step on the moon for several years, and by that time, NASA will have spent about $100 billion.... “It’s a future where NASA will land the first woman and the first person of color on the moon,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference this month. “And on these increasingly complex missions, astronauts will live and work in deep space and will develop the science and technology to send the first humans to Mars.” ...Today’s program was named Artemis by NASA leaders during the Trump administration. In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo. ...NASA is also hoping to jump-start companies looking to set up a steady business of flying scientific instruments and other payloads to the moon, and to inspire students to enter science and engineering fields.… 

https://eos.org/agu-news/brighter-skies-ahead By Heather Goss , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...An impressive cadre of Sun-targeted missions has recently come online to replace or support an aging fleet of spacecraft, just as solar max is about to set in. ...In February 2020, Solar Orbiter launched from Florida, carrying 10 state-of-the-art instruments to make the closest ever observations of the Sun. Daniele Telloni and colleagues, in “ A New Journey Around (and Around) the Sun , ” describe for us “the groundbreaking observations that Solar Orbiter has made already,” such as the “short-lived, small-scale flickering bright spots, nicknamed ‘campfires,’ in the solar corona.” Not only will this joint European Space Agency–NASA mission shed new light on the unsolved mysteries of the Sun, but also it’s revealing a new side of Venus from its 2020 flyby. ...in our next feature, “ Shake, Rattle, and Probe .” Helioseismology is a burgeoning discipline that allows physicists to better understand...

https://www.science.org/content/article/carbon-dioxide-detected-around-alien-world-first-time By Daniel Clery, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Astronomers have found carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere of a Saturn-size planet 700 light-years away—the first unambiguous detection of the gas in a planet beyond the Solar System. The discovery, made by the  James Webb Space Telescope , provides clues to how the planet formed. The result also shows just how quickly Webb may identify a spate of other gases, such as methane and ammonia, which could hint at a planet’s potential habitability for life. ...The Webb telescope is sensitive to infrared wavelengths of light that are mostly blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. ...the infrared sensitivity is also critical for researchers.... When an exoplanet’s orbit takes it in front of its star, some of the starlight passes through the planet’s atmosphere and carries fingerprints of its composition. The atmospheric gases absorb specific wavelength...

https://www.science.org/content/article/all-seeing-telescope-will-snap-exploding-stars-may-spy-hidden-world By Daniel Clery, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Array of 900 instruments will make movies of heavens, revealing short-lived and fast-changing events. ...Argus aims to achieve its unique vision with hundreds of off-the-shelf telescopes, each just 20 centimeters across and watching a different patch of sky. The final array will match the light-gathering power of a telescope with a single 5-meter mirror, which typically costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but cheap components should keep Argus’s cost below $20 million, Law says. The challenge will come in stitching together the array’s 900 images into a single, seamless movie of the night sky.… 

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/08/22/webbs-jupiter-images-showcase-auroras-hazes/ By Alise Fisher , NASA Webb Space Telescope.  Excerpt: ...NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of [Jupiter].  ...“We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. ...“It’s really remarkable that we can see details on Jupiter together with its rings, tiny satellites, and even galaxies in one image,” she said. The two images come from the observatory’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which has three specialized infrared filters that showcase details of the planet. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the light has been mapped onto the visible spectrum. Generally, the longest wavelengths appear redder and the shortest wavelengths are shown as more blue. Scientists collaborated with citizen scientist Judy Schmidt to translate ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/stowaways-nasa-s-massive-moon-rocket-promise-big-science-small-packages By Erik Hand, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: CubeSats packed on Artemis 1 will target lunar ice—if their batteries don’t fail them. When NASA’s most powerful rocket ever attempts its first flight this month, its highest profile payload will be three instrumented mannequins, setting off on a 42-day journey beyond the Moon and back. They are stand-ins for the astronauts that the 98-meter-tall rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), is supposed to carry to the Moon as soon as 2025, as part of NASA’s Artemis program. But there will be other voyagers along for the ride when the SLS lifts off on 29 August: 10 CubeSats, satellites no bigger than a small briefcase, to probe the Moon, asteroids, and the radiation environment of deep space. ...Several SLS CubeSats will focus on lunar ice, which has intrigued researchers ever since NASA’s Lunar Prospector discovered a signal su...

https://www.science.org/content/article/nearby-star-midlife-crisis-suggests-our-own-sun-may-lose-its-spots-again-decades By Zack Savitsky, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Long magnetic lull on star mimics the Maunder Minimum, when the Sun’s spots largely disappeared 400 years ago. Soon after European astronomers developed the first telescopes at the start of the 17th century, they observed dark spots speckling the Sun’s surface. They also handed their modern successors a mystery. From about 1645 to 1715, the spots, now known to be indicators of solar activity, all but disappeared. Gathering sunspot counts and other historical observations, astronomer John Eddy concluded nearly 50 years ago that the Sun had essentially taken a 70-year nap, which he called  the Maunder Minimum  after an astronomer couple who had previously studied it. Now, it appears the Sun is not the only star that takes long naps. By building a decades-long record of observations of a few dozen stars at...